A new initiative dedicated to independent cinema emerging from Jewish–Arab and Jewish–Muslim cultural worlds. Bringing together voices from Israel–Palestine, North Africa, Turkey and their diasporas, the showcase explores intertwined histories and contemporary forms of cultural encounter.

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Programme

Cinemes Girona, Carrer Girona, 175, Barcelona

 

13 November
Coexistence, My Ass!, directed by Amber Fares

14 November
No sea tu falta, directed by Moisés Salama

15 November
Lyd, directed by Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland

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Roundtable · Cinema in a Polarised World

14 November · 16:00–18:00 · Casa Adret, Salomó ben Adret 6, Barcelona

An open conversation with filmmakers Sarah Ema Friedland and Rami Younis and comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi, moderated by Rotem Heymann, on artistic freedom and independent cinema in a polarised world.

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About 

The Barcelona Independent Jewish–Arab Film Showcase creates a space where cinema can do what political discourse often struggles to achieve: hold complexity without reducing it, reveal contradictions without rushing to resolve them, and bring audiences closer to experiences marked by humour, intimacy, discomfort and profound humanity.

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Rooted in lived experience and shaped by artistic rigour, these films reveal lives and realities often absent from dominant narratives. Many of their creators occupy positions that resist familiar categories. Their work opens difficult questions while remaining attentive to the people and experiences at its heart.

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For centuries, Jewish, Arab and Muslim communities across the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North Africa were connected through shared languages and cultural life. Colonialism, nationalism, migration and the formation of new states profoundly transformed these worlds. The showcase explores the traces of those connections and the contemporary realities that continue to emerge from them.

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Barcelona offers a meaningful setting for these conversations. Its Mediterranean history and cultural life, shaped by migration and debates about memory and belonging, connect the questions raised on screen with those facing the city itself.

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Organisers and Partners

The showcase is a joint initiative of the Institute for Jewish Studies Barcelona (EJB), the Barcelona Jewish Film Festival and the ALBI Foundation.

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This inaugural edition takes place within the framework of the Barcelona Jewish Film Festival, following its Simone Bitton retrospective at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. The programme combines films from ALBI’s catalogue with works selected from other sources.

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Conceived as an annual event and the Barcelona home of a wider touring programme, the showcase seeks to build lasting connections between filmmakers, cultural institutions and audiences, supporting independent cinema and the conversations it makes possible.

 

 

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​​​​​Coexistence, My Ass!

Amber Fares 
2025
United States / France
91 min

13/11 – 20h
Cinemes Girona

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Comedy and satire have proven a powerful tool for confronting audiences with truths they sometimes prefer to ignore. Noam Shuster Eliassi is a case in point: a diplomat turned comedian who, raised in a Palestinian-Israeli village marketed as an “oasis of peace” and disillusioned with traditional activism, moves to the United States to pursue a career in stand-up — a stage from which she has repeatedly spoken out about the genocide in Gaza. Amber Fares meets Shuster Eliassi in Ramallah and begins following her in 2019, documenting the personal and professional journey that follows. Coexistence, My Ass! (Special Jury Award for Freedom of Expression at Sundance) is the result of that alliance: a deeply human portrait that draws attention to the many, often unexpected ways of engaging with the fight for global justice.

Presentation by Noam Shuster Eliassi + Q&A

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No sea tu falta

Moisés Salama 
2025
Spain
70 min
Original version in Spanish

14/11 – 20h
Cinemes Girona

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A first-person documentary in which, drawing on Super-8 footage of his childhood and youth alongside personal videos of Melilla past and present, its director — having just turned 70 — examines the contradictions of his city and of his own Jewish identity. A family self-portrait that reflects on roots, the Sephardic community, unresolved mourning, and the power of dialogue and coexistence. A love letter to the Spanish autonomous city, an exercise in memory aimed at understanding and inhabiting the present. The film’s title is a popular expression among North African Jews that the director’s mother used to repeat: it means something like “you’re not here, we miss you, but let it not be because you’re gone for good.”

Presentation by Moisés Salama + Q&A

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Lyd

Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland 
2024
United States
79 min.
Arabic, Hebrew

15/11 – 20h
Cinemes Girona

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Lyd (the Arabic name for Lod, a city in present-day Israel) tells the story of a 5,000-year-old Palestinian city, occupied following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Drawing on previously unseen archival footage and a range of testimonies, the film reconstructs the trauma of the massacre and the expulsion of the Palestinian population, while animated sequences imagine an alternative reality in which that same community lives free of violence. Narrated by Palestinian actress Maisa Abd Elhadi — who gives voice to the personified city — the film combines documentary and fabulation to ask which future should prevail. Directed by a Palestinian originally from Lyd and an American Jewish filmmaker, it offers a necessary look at the Nakba from the perspective of those who lived it, imagining a liberated Palestine where Muslims, Christians, and Jews live together in community.

Presentation by Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland + Q&A

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